1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic semiconductor devices, and, more particularly to source/drain structures of field effect transistors.
2. Description of the Related Art
A difficulty in the fabrication of small-geometry metal-oxide-silicon field effect transistors (MOSFET) is the following quandary: If the source/drains are doped to a level high enough to give reasonably low series resistance, the magnitude of the electric field in the channel adjacent to the drain during the on-state will be so high that hot carriers and impact ionization effects will become a nuisance.
As the MOSFET channel becomes shorter, the electric field along the channel becomes more important. That is, the potential distribution becomes two dimensional, and the effect of the electric field along the channel can no longer be ignored while considering the effects of the electric field normal to the channel. In particular, where the electric field along the channel is high, as it is likely to be in short-channel MOS devices impact ionization is likely to occur near the drain. The resulting substrate current greatly increases the likelihood of latch-up. In addition, hot carriers are also likely to be generated by the strong electric field magnitude near the drain, and some of these carriers may be injected into the oxide, leading to threshold shift.
A difficulty in fabricating MOS devices with reasonably shallow source/drain diffusions is that the sharp curvature of the junction will cause a locally increased electric field, and therefore a reduced breakdown voltage. This causes great difficulty when high-voltage devices with reasonably small geometry are desired. If an arsenic implanted drain junction is to have a reasonable curvature, a very long drive-in time is required, causing undesired thermal effects in the other parts of the device.
A further difficulty in the fabrication of small-geometry MOS integrated circuit devices is the parasitic source/drain resistance, and self-aligned silicides such as titanium disilicide are frequenctly formed on source/drains to lower the sheet resistivity. See for example, R. Haken, Application of the Self-Aligned Titanium Silicide Process to Very Large-Scale Integrated n-Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor and Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Technologies, 3 J. Vac. Sci.Tech. B 1657 (1985) and M. Alperin et al, Development of the Self-Alignqed Titanium Silicide Process for VLSI Applications, 32 IEEE Tr.Elec.Dev. 141 (1985). But a heavily phosphorus-doped N-type source/drain (to minimize the silicon/silicide contact resistance)leads to a deep source/drain region, large drain effect, and isolation encroachment. Contrarily, an arsenic doped source/drain region will not be deep enough to avoid consumption of the shallow arsenic-doped silicon during silicidation leading to high junction leakage or spiking by the silicide through to the substrate if (as in CMOS structures) only low temperature drive-ins of implants can be used because of the high diffusivity of boron implants in other parts of the integrated circuit.
Thus the known small-geometry MOS devices have problems including hot electrons, high source/drain contact resistance to an overlying silicide layer, and shallow junction consumption/silicide spiking during silicidation leading to junction leakage.